About Us

The Heritage Room is located in the Athens-Clarke County library. We collect, preserve, organize, and make accessible resources about the Athens area, the state of Georgia, and the Southeastern United States.
Let us help you with your research!

The Athens Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: What Can It Tell Us about the Era and America?

Dr. Nancy MacLean, Arts and Sciences professor of History at Duke University and author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan will speak about her prize-winning book that uses a rare, surviving cache of internal Klan records in Athens to make new sense of the movement in the context of the changing world of the 1920s.

In addition to racism and violence, the Klan also wanted to enforce traditional moral codes on the young people of the carefree Jazz Age. With more than 2 million members in chapters in most cities and towns of every state, the Klan dominated the legislatures, police forces, courts, and executive branches at every level. Dr. MacLean will use her Athens research to offer a new understanding of the era and explore some of the enduring patterns of response to economic crisis and social challenge that have resonance for our own time.